It’s been widely accepted in the CFB 25 community that hard selling is the best use of your recruiting points. Scheduling visits, trying to sway, or sending the house are all thought of as a misallocation of resources.
Previously, we went over how Sending The House can make more sense than Hard Selling for some recruits.
Today we are looking into if it ever makes sense to use 40 hours to schedule a visit instead of using those same hours to hard sell.
Spoiler Alert: Using hard sell is often the right move but it is far from guaranteed!
The Usual Caveats
As always, our goal was to keep everything in this experiment as consistent as possible given the constraints of the game. That being said, we are sharing our findings with our fellow degenerate gamers, not submitting to the American Medical Association so keep that in mind as you are going through this article.
For these tests, we kept things like position, pipelines, dealbreakers, lack of coach recruiting upgrades, and whether our team or not a team won all consistent.
Then we just tweaked whether we’d spend 40 hours on a visit (one week before) or 40 hours on a hard sell.
Since you have to schedule the visits one week before, in that case we’d spend 40 hours the week before and then nothing the week of the visits. For hard sells, we’d spend nothing the week before and then 40 hours on the hard sell the following week. In either case, a total of 40 recruiting hours were used.
We ran these experiments with a bunch of different teams and players to make sure our findings were accurate but to keep this post a reasonable length we’ll just show you a handful of them so you can see for yourself.
Case Study #1
The image above shows a 3 star QB’s progress bar in 5 different scenarios
- Baseline
- Spending 40 hours on Hard Sell (With Good Grades)
- Spending 40 hours on a visit (With a Loss)
- Spending 40 hours on a visit (With a Win)
- Doing both a hard sell and a visit (With a Win)
The image really tells the whole story incredibly clearly.
Hard Sell + Visit
In this case, the hard sell + visit combo was far and away the most effective. We expected that since it was a total outlay of 80 hours (40 for hard sell and 40 for the visit).
So if it is a recruit you really desperately want, do both. But that is a finding most people have already been able to feel out on their own just from playing the game.
Only Hard Sell
The next best option in this scenario was to simply just spend the 40 hours on a hard sell and ignore the visit scheduling entirely. That is the conventional wisdom in our community and in this case it turns out to be correct.
It is important to note however, that for this recruit we are hard selling with 3 really strong grades.
Schedule A Visit (And Win)
It isn’t shown in the image above but in this scenario we scheduled the visit against a team where if we won we’d get 1 green arrow up and if we lost we’d receive 3 red arrows down.
This will vary based on how good the the team is that you are playing when a recruit comes on a visit. The better the team you are playing, the bigger the benefit of the win.
We also emphasized the A+ motivation for this recruit on his visit. You can see in this example, spending 40 hours on a visit gives a really nice boost but not nearly as good as if you just spent the 40 hours on hard sell.
Schedule A Visit (And Lose)
The really glaring downside of scheduling a visit is if you lose, you get almost nothing. This shows how important it is to win games when you have recruits visiting.
Case Study #2
Our first case study showed how if you are at an elite school like Texas with great grades, hard selling is the correct move.
But what if you have 1 really good grade and 2 grades that aren’t so good?
That’s what we’ll take a look at in the image below.
This example features 3 images on top of each other:
- Our starting baseline interest
- A hard sell with A+, C, C- grades
- A visit that you win with an A+ grade
Hard Sell
You can see that the hard sell does a solid job. There is a noticeable bump from the previous week.
Visit (A+) With Win
The shocking finding in this scenario is if you win the game and focus your visit on a really strong grade, in this case A+, you get a significantly bigger boost than if you were to follow conventional wisdom and hard sell.
Just judging based on the influence meter it looks about twice as impactful.
Note: This was a win against a normal team with 2 green arrows up for winning and 2 red arrows down for losing.
Case Study #2 Takeaway
If you are a lower rated team that doesn’t have A’s and B’s for all of your motivations, it can make sense in some cases to use 40 hours to schedule a visit with 1 really good grade, instead of spending 40 hours to hard sell 2 other just okay grades.
The key variable though is to make sure you win. If you were to lose on this visit, you’d still be much better off hard selling.
Case Study #3
In case study #2 we determined that in some cases, it very much makes sense to spend 40 hours on a visit instead of on a hard sell. Specifically if you win the game and have 1 elite grade with 2 not as good grades.
In this next example, we are going to look into the impact of scheduling a visit with an elite grade vs. scheduling a visit with a bad grade.
The takeaway here is exactly what we’d expect. Scheduling a visit with an activity emphasizing a good grade like “A” is significantly more impactful than a visit with a bad grade like “D.”
The other important thing to note in this example is that this visit took place against an FCS team with no green triangle benefits for a win. Even so you can see that when you win with a good visit, it is still more impactful than just a hard sell.
Overall Takeaways
There are a few overall takeaways from all of this.
First, if you are at an elite program with good grades for most motivations, you shouldn’t be spending hours on visits instead of hard selling. Although for those truly generational players that you just have to have on your team, you should do both assuming you have enough weekly recruiting hours.
Second, if you are a smaller school with bad grades for most motivations but have something like an “A” for proximity to home, it can be very beneficial to instead use 40 hours on a visit instead of on a hard sell. This only holds true though if you are confident that you will win. If there is a chance that you lose, it may make sense to play it safe and hard sell depending on the lead you have over other schools
Third, although not explicitly shown in these examples, you want your visits to give you the maximum possible boosts that you can. The perfect scenario is to blow out a team better than you with a couple complimentary visits scheduled on the same week. The more green arrows you get on your visits, the faster your influence meter will shoot up.
And lastly, there is no direct impact based on wins and losses when you are using the hard sell option on a recruit. You’ll gain the same influence each week whether you win or lose. This makes it a significantly safer option than scheduling a visit.
Next up: Check out our College Football 25 Recruiting Insights Engine!
